I use Purelymail, they're a tiny operation, but I've never had a single mail delivery issue. They're also by far the cheapest for most personal usecases. Their pricing is kind of "honor" based, you get simple pricing at 10 dollars a year without limits, unlimited users, domains, storage etc., but if you go overboard with it they'll ask you to use advanced pricing, which honestly is even cheaper, at least for my personal mail that I use like a normal person (a few incoming mails a day, one or two outgoing mails per week), advanced would be at.. 3 dollars a year or something.
My second option would be Migadu, though I've not tried them myself yet (I have zero complaints with Purelymail and will use them for as long as they exist).
Another thing I kind of wanted to try is to run a basic mail server on my own hosts, and send the mail through a provider like Purelymail or something, for full control over storage and backups, has anyone here tried that?
For personal or family, I think Fastmail is fine. I use it for a family account (paid years in advance), and admin other Fastmail tenants "family office" style for those who trust me to and offload the responsibility. I can get ahold of someone at Fastmail easily when issues crop up, which is rare. O365 is what I recommend for anything SMB and up. You can at least get support from Microsoft when needed. AWS is fine for cloud resources and infra, again, you can get support from a TAM or similar. But Google? I have never once had a good experience attempting to get in touch with a human when resolution is needed, hence my position on the topic. You cannot self serve critical business infra (imho), and Google is allergic to providing human support.
Buy your own domain and run mox (https://github.com/mjl-/mox) on it. In the setup it provides details on the DKIM info you need to put into your DNS records. Get a PTR record from your ISP (if hosting at home); periodically check your blocking from spamhaus etc.
I run mine on a Pi4 no problem whatsoever, but I guess a VPS could also be used, although the scamalytics analysis will show it's a server or an IP shared with an anonymising VPN etc. if it's a shared IP on the host.
